Finally, even if he didn't come, we hoped the letter would be enough to divert his attention from any thought of fugitive boats and runaway lovers.

I could have made the terms of it even more alluring, but the signorina, with that extraordinarily distorted morality distinctive of her sex, refused to swear to anything literally untrue in a letter which was itself from beginning to end a monumental falsehood; though not a student of ethics, she was keenly alive to the distinction between the _expressio falsi_ and the _suppressio veri_.

The only passage she doubted about was the last, "If you come back to me." "But then he won't come back _to me_ if I'm not there!" she exclaimed triumphantly.
What happened to him after he landed--whether he cooked the colonel's goose or the colonel cooked his--I really could not afford to consider.

As a matter of personal preference, I should have liked the former, but I did not allow any such considerations to influence my conduct.

My only hope was that the killing would take long enough to leave time for our unobtrusive exit.